Phillies pitcher Jake Diekman walks back to the mound after giving up a grand slam to the Braves' Dan Uggla in Atlanta's 9-6 win April 14. Diekman and the rest of the Phils' bullpen aren't consistently good enough to carry the team to October baseball. (AP Photo/H. Rumph Jr)

Sometimes Jonathan Papelbon can take the ball in the ninth inning and protect a small lead for three outs. Other times, he can’t.

Sometimes Jake Diekman and Antonio Bastardo enter a close game and keep the Phillies in a position to win. Other times, they don’t.

Mario Hollands seems promising all those times he doesn’t seem like a rookie, which is sometimes.

Mike Adams might have something left in the tank even without the velocity of his prime. Of course, he might not.

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Jeff Manship might be a perfectly functional long reliever, if he’s permitted to stick to long relief. Shawn Camp is a 38-year-old veteran whose very existence in the majors depends upon signing with a team with just the right amount of stank in the bullpen.

Ken Giles has been electric … for three weeks … in Double-A … a season after he was erratic in the Florida State League.

Brad Lincoln, B.J. Rosenberg and Justin De Fratus already failed to do enough to meet big-league bullpen standards in Ryne Sandberg’s eyes — and the Phillies these days can’t be as picky as many teams.

No reliever gets the job done every time he takes the mound. The great ones have a 90-plus percent success rate. The decent ones are more in the 80 percent range.

The Phillies have no great relievers. They have a few decent ones, and those pitchers are only decent as long as you don’t wear their treads down to the radials by June.

This is not big news. The Phillies are in their third year of waiting for guys like De Fratus, Diekman and Rosenberg to join the realm of dependable major-league relievers. Diekman is close. Maybe he’s there. It’s early. The jury is still out. De Fratus and Rosenberg have stumbled enough in the quest to put them behind the glass window that reads “in case of emergency, give one more chance.” They have failed to earn anything more than another shot in a crisis situation.

Those are the guys still in possession of a big-league pulse, faint as it might be. Mike Stutes and Jeremy Horst are flat-liners. Phillippe Aumont, figuratively speaking, is either brain-dead or in a deep coma, which in his case seems to be difficult to differentiate.

That is the State of the Bullpen for the Phillies. And there is not a whole lot that can be done to change it for 2014. To think Giles holds a magical solution within his 102 mph fastball is preposterous. It will take more than one phenom to make the Phillies’ bullpen anything more than mediocre.

That is why it is time to come to this acceptance: The Phillies aren’t going to be in the postseason. The starting pitching could be good enough. The lineup isn’t good enough to carry the team far. The defense is subpar. Put those three facts together, and you would need a tremendously airtight bullpen to give the Phils a fighting chance for a wild-card spot.

The bullpen is way, way, way less than that. And if you can find a bullpen that was reconstructed to contention form on the fly during a season, good luck. The last team to have an ERA as high as the Phillies’ bullpen ERA of 5.64 in the first half of a season and reach the playoffs, it was the 2005 Red Sox. The team cobbled together its bullpen in the second half by throwing an old, fading Curt Schilling back there and calling up a youngster named Jonathan Papelbon. And that didn’t really solve the problem. Boston scored a baseball-best 910 runs that season, outscoring enough opponents to squeeze into October ball so it could be swept in the opening round by the White Sox.

This was the reason why it didn’t make sense for Ruben Amaro Jr. to re-sign Chase Utley late last season, or bring back Carlos Ruiz, or bother spending $16 million on 36-year-old Marlon Byrd. If the bullpen wasn’t going to be addressed, there was no point in trying to make a run with the over-the-hill gang.

Even at their best, they had no shot — not with the bullpen that sometimes can, but too often cannot.